The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 24, 2025 — The product of a famously tumultuous production, William Friedkin’s nerve-jangling adaptation of the classic suspense novel The Wages of Fear infuses the mechanics of genre with rough-hewn realism and the New Hollywood’s renegade spirit.
Mar 25, 2025 — Unfettered by the precepts of bourgeois morality and the nuclear family, the characters in Alan Rudolph’s romantic drama struggle to find happiness as they navigate love’s whims and ambiguities.
Essays
Feb 18, 2025 — In her mainstream breakthrough, director Joan Micklin Silver envisions New York City through the eyes of a complicated, searching woman trying to figure out her place in the world.
The Daily
May 17, 2019 — Ly’s fiery fiction feature debut alludes not only to Hugo but also to Fuqua, Kassovitz, and Spike Lee.
Apr 1, 2019 — The artist, photographer, and filmmaker leaves behind one of the most varied and restless oeuvres in cinema.
Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...
Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...
Oct 1, 2018 — A breathtaking, rarely screened vérité document encapsulates the social and aesthetic sea change that transformed France in the spring of 1968.
The Daily
Jan 25, 2018 — Over a month ago now, we posted the first round in the ongoing series of lineup announcements from the Berlin International Film Festival, whose sixty-eighth edition runs from February 15 through 25. And that round revealed the first eleven titles...
Oct 8, 2017 — The New York Film Festival presents BPM (Beats Per Minute) tonight and tomorrow, and we begin with Jordan Cronk, writing for Cinema Scope: “A sprawling yet affectingly personal portrait of a group of Parisian activists and ACT UP members in...